I’m an introvert on the personality tests, but not so far from the extrovert side of the measurement. I just have to be in the right mood, or make a conscious effort to be more outgoing.

My social experiment went pretty well. I hung out with an old friend I had known since middle school and two of his college friends, who I had not known before. I sold one book on the spot just by introducing myself and talking with a classmate, who got out her cell phone and ordered from Amazon before we departed (at least she said she did).

Colgate University Reunion Torchlight Procession

I talked with one drunk graduate 25 years my junior about his entrepreneurial idea to launch a website to help locally-owned retail businesses in small towns to increase their online sales, and a drunk nurse who turned out to be the daughter of the owner of a popular pub in the college town. I’m counting the drunkards even though they tend to babble on endlessly, just because I stuck with it long enough to learn about them.

But the most interesting conversation of the reunion weekend came out of the blue. I was hanging out with my new buddies in a side room where the soda dispenser was located during our class dinner, not feeling much like mingling in the main hall because I was enjoying the company of these guys. A woman walked in who I recognized. I had never known her well, but I knew we lived in the same dorm freshman year and must have had many mutual acquaintances from that time.

I introduced myself and we wound up talking by the soda machine for maybe five minutes. There was nothing spectacular about that. Anyone can chit-chat about the weather, where they live or their job for five minutes. What was exceptional about this conversation compared to any other I had at reunion was the depth of the content in a time so short that it would normally be reserved strictly for small talk.

She told me she was going through a divorce after about 20 years of marriage and three sons. I replied that I had experienced a similar situation, except with younger kids and a shorter marriage. I asked if she was the one who wanted the break or if it was mutual. She responded that she didn’t want a divorce; it was at her husband’s initiative. I said mine happened the same way. She acknowledged that divorce “sucks.” I asked her how her sons were handling it. She responded that the two older ones seemed OK, but the youngest, a teenager, was having a hard time coping with it.

Then she told me what was weighing heavily on her mind as part of the divorce package: she was faced with selling her house and moving within a month or two. Again, I told her I had been through a similar scenario. I wished her the best in handling a difficult time of life. She knew I had participated in the author signing and expressed an interest in the book, so I took down her e-mail to correspond later.

And then we said goodbye and she left the room. I saw her again at breakfast the next morning, but from a distance and only long enough to wave hello. And that was that. I did e-mail her with information about Three Yards and a Plate of Mulletafter I got home, but didn’t hear back.

This woman invited me into the most consequential happenings in her personal life during a brief encounter. Why, I don’t know. We could have just as easily talked about nothing for five minutes, or just said a quick hello and gone separate ways. I was grateful she engaged in a conversation with meaning.

I got to know her – the real person with real life issues – just a little, and it felt genuine to make an authentic connection, as brief as it was. Such authentic conversations in which someone dares to reveal something personal and meaningful are all too rare, and makes life and personal interaction so much more lively and interesting.

12 simple lessons I learned, and am still learning, through writing my first novel, Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet. The story follows an overmatched, rookie sportswriter in Florida covering a season of high school football in a football-mad, semi-backwater town who runs up against a powerful coach from a dynastic family who just may have orchestrated a bribe to get the best athletes redistricted to his school.

If you have difficulty adopting long-term views or goals, try to adapt or don’t bother starting.

There is such a thing as “powering through” with willpower when it comes to writing; it’s just a different type of pain.

Taking public transportation to work is a good way to get a lot of writing done.

You don’t have to plan out your whole plot and every detail – but having a basic idea of a story sequence helps speed the process.

One of the hardest things about fiction-writing was remembering details about plot, characters and scenes that were written one or two years prior, to ensure story lines and plot connections were logical and to avoid sloppy errors.

The Chicago Manual of Style is more a hindrance than a help in many instances.

It’s a good idea to have Beta readers for pre-publication feedback. I didn’t, but will find them next time.

Writing a self-published novel as a first-time, unknown author is an extremely difficult way to make money, so you better have a passion for the act and the process.

I didn’t realize the importance of having or building a “platform” to market and sell a novel, but now that I’ve self-published, it appears essential for success.

I’m glad I self-published despite much popular wisdom that says only traditionally published novels optioned by an agent bestow credibility on the novel and author. Publishing house acquisition is a long road to hoe, and immediate gratification rather than posthumous glory was my desire.

I signed up with the first self-publisher I researched, and would recommend CreateSpace to others based on my experience.

There are many people in the U.S. Very few care that you wrote a book. It’s your job to find a few more who will care…then a few more, and a few more. ThreeYardsCover

Next Friday night at this time I will be driving through North Nowheresville, PA, somewhere near Scranton, corporate home of Dunder Mifflin, on my way to my 30th college reunion at Colgate University in the tiny upstate village of Hamilton, NY.

It’s a seven- to eight-hour drive from the DC area, and I can’t leave until 5 p.m. because it’s the first day of summer session class for my counseling program. The reunion check-in office closes at 2 a.m., so I’ll be cutting it close and could be spending the night on a bench overlooking the campus pond.

I decided to go last-minute because I’ll have the opportunity to participate as an author in a book-signing event at the campus bookstore, my first public appearance to promote the self-published Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet.

Colgate is a beautiful campus in a picturesque setting, so I enjoy going back, except for the drive. The weekend is packed with activities, lectures and celebrations – the university does a great job welcoming back its alumni. And I enjoy seeing a small group of friends with whom I lived freshman year and with whom I participated on a particularly zealous intramural team through senior year.

But the vast majority of my classmates who will attend will be strangers to me – some people I never knew at all, and others I may have known as acquaintances but certainly not anymore with the passage of time.

So I’m going to try a social experiment during this reunion, especially since I’m going there to be a self-promoter for my book anyway. I’m going to try to step out of my comfort zone and my small bubble of friends and introduce myself and talk to people from my class whom I don’t know or barely knew. You see, everyone will be doing the same thing – socializing and hanging with the same people they did 30 years ago, and for the most part overlooking others who weren’t part of their group.

It’s human nature. Cliques don’t change. There’s comfort in cliques, comfort in what’s known. There’s risk in stepping out. It’s not easy for a person like me, an introvert by nature but who still likes to be sociable and can flip the extroversion switch at times. I’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll come home with some new friends…and hopefully a few sales.

I just accomplished a big life goal, one of those that you say you are going to do “someday” and that “someday” often never comes. Someday came on April 16, 2015, when my first novel, Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet, was published and posted on Amazon.

Sometimes social media, including blogs such as this, are all about self-aggrandizement and self-promotion – I did this, I did that, look at me, aren’t I great, aren’t I special? I cop to this to some degree, with this post being Exhibit A. Writing the book was half the battle, the first offensive. But if I want it to get out in the world, I will have to embark on a publicity and marketing blitzkrieg to cover all flanks, and, yes, self-promotion.

But maybe my story can inspire someone else who is still thinking about that great accomplishment or effort or plan they will make “someday” in the indeterminate future.

I had thought about writing a book for all of my adult life, but never very seriously, at least not seriously enough to ever determine or commit to what exactly I would write about or to draft a first sentence. As I got further into midlife, that lack of commitment began to bother me. You can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write; you can’t call yourself creative if you create nothing. It’s just unrealized potential.

If you do write, you may find out you are not a writer – at least not a novelist/author, the way you believed you were – so it may be safer not to write so you can maintain your self-perception or self-delusion that you are. It’s the same with many things: the fear of failure can prevent you from trying, which can serve to preserve your self-image.

On many bus rides home from work, I began thinking seriously about actually starting a novel or possibly a non-fiction book, with a growing sense of now-or-never urgency. It was dawning on me that “someday” may never come, and that I was just a fraud (as an author, at least). I mulled over several ideas on the bus, and in the first act of commitment, sketched out some plot ideas for two novel concepts.

I finally decided on one, because I knew it best. The novel would be based on my days as a sportswriter in Florida, my first job out of college, where I covered intense seasons of high school football in a football-mad community and lived a typical bachelor life with other guys at the same stage, except in a tropical environment.

Three Yards and a Plate of Mulletis about a 22-year-old sports fanatic from up North, who lands a job in an insular, foreign community down South, and soon runs up against the region’s power broker, the intimidating coach of the perennial high school football powerhouse, who just may have masterminded a school redistricting conspiracy to keep his team on top, and the eccentric characters the sportswriter meets along the way.

In real life, when I first set foot on a deserted Florida high school football field on a scorching preseason August 1985 day, I remember thinking two things about my new adventure: “Where the heck am I?” and “Someday this would make a good novel.”

One day on a Christmas break from work in 2011, I went to the library, intending to start writing, but came home with nothing. Later during that break, I wrote my first two paragraphs longhand. I didn’t wind up using those paragraphs, but that was my breakthrough. For me, it’s like running: The hardest part is putting on the clothes and getting out the front door.

I decided to start with a prologue – setting up the story line of the book with what came before. That allowed me to basically write about my youth and everything that led to me becoming a sportswriter without having to make up much fiction yet. It worked, it got me writing. I also had an idea for some action in the first chapter that would set the scene and the plot of the book, and wrote that next. After I wrote those parts, I gained a sense of possibility.

Writing the book was a long grind, and anything but a straight line. I had only a vague outline of how the story would go, and made up a lot as I progressed. I wrote a lot of it in pieces, not in sequence, and then looked for ways to connect the parts and make transitions.

Time was a big factor. My workday commands 11 hours, including commuting time. That left weekends and weeknights, when I was already physically tired and tired of sitting in front of a computer. I also had just started a graduate school program.

But I started getting good at squeezing in bits of writing whenever I had the chance. I wrote half or more of the book longhand during my bus commutes to and from work. I also wrote in airports, planes and hotels while on travel, while “watching” my daughter’s half and full marathons, at work in the lunch room, and on Capitol Hill while killing time before a work event.

A few months into my effort, I broke my leg in a soccer game. I became depressed, to the point where I lost inspiration to write, and became consumed with rehabbing and just trying to get through my workdays. It was several months before I could motivate to resume.

All told, it took three years to complete a draft, about 111,000 words. One of the most challenging parts was trying to remember what I had written a year or two earlier to make sure the plot would make sense and there weren’t errors in consistency. It had seemed like an interminable project until the last four months or so, when I sensed that I could actually finish. I powered through a lot of writing during two weeks off of work. I can see how a lot of people may start something like this but never finish – it’s a commitment to persistence and a long time for a payoff.

I went the self-publishing route, which took about three months – it was more important to me to publish, and in a timely way, not sell.